Free Online Student Publishing

Encouraging students to publish their work online or even to create their own blog is a wonderful way to increase students participation in writing and creative writing. Being able to maintain all of a child’s work in one place allows students and parents also to participate in the progress of each child. For teachers and administrators of school, developing an online writing program that fits into the core requirements of your state is fairly easy and very affordable. Here are four free programs that are easy to set up and easy for students to use.

Scriffon

Scriffon is a free online student publishing platform, and it is also an easy to use. This is an excellent program that supports just about any type of writing project you have in mind. What makes Scriffon perfect for the class room is that students are not locked into writing just one type of report, they are free to write essays, reviews, how-to articles, news articles, poetry, and creative writing projects.

Set up is easy and students can publish under their own name or under a pen name. Once published articles are easy to edit. Plus, students can write a little at a time and save a draft copy and then continue the project when needed. Overall, this is a good program for teaching students about writing, formatting, story development, and publishing.

Wordfaire:

Wordfaire is a free live-blogging platform, which is great for communicating larger written pieces with photographs, video, or other media content. There are really no limits to what students can achieve using a live-blog platform. It works somewhat like Twitter except that Twitter is used to send short messages, and Wordfaire is used to communicate entire articles, journalistic pieces, poetry, or whatever creative content students can invent. While the program is free, posted content contains ads, which can be a source of income or not. A potential drawback is that log in to the site is via Twitter, Facebook, or Google.

WordPress:

WordPress is a blogging platform that is free, and they also have a paid service. WordPress is easy to set up, and the free blog comes with a wordpress.com address, and basic customizing tools. Students are limited to 3GB of spaces. Posts can be edited at any time and can also include photographs. This service is more suited to junior high or high school students, than it is to younger students. The benefit of this site is that it is something the student can easily take with them after they graduate.

Studentreasures Online Publishing:

Studentreasures free online student publishing offers a free version of their publishing software for school programs. This program allows all of the students in a class to create a book. They even offer to print a single hardbound copy for free. This program is ideal for students under grade 6th. This is a powerful teaching tool that allows students to collaborate on a single project. It is easy to use and supports graphics that allow students to create the artwork for their book. It also allows teachers to comment and add corrections which are then sent to the student for correction. All of this is done online. The program is smart enough also to notify teachers when the corrections have been made.

Teaching children and young adults to become creative writers helps students to become engaged in their lessons. It is a tool that helps to motivate students to learn by participation. Because these programs are online, it is possible that students can work on their projects at home. Many of these programs are easy to use and easy to set up. They allow teachers, parents and students to monitor the work that is created.